Autonomous web development

Automated web development offers an alternative that allows businesses to innovate their business models and effectively automate their work processes for growing audiences.

These web automations help businesses to become more self-sufficient by decreasing their admin workload and also longer-term front-end development costs in the process too.

With that said, reducing the need for both manual admin work and manual website updates poses many advantages and disadvantages that are worth weighing up in regards to your business model.

The main disadvantages being personalisation and flexibility, which can entirely depend on how well your website’s automation processes flow.

Styles of autonomous web development

Online calculators & instant quote checkers

Calculators and instant quote checkers have become a massively popular online tool used on many service-based websites, instantly providing visitors with the information that they require; without even having to even speak to an adviser at all.

Not only does this effectively remove the need for any initial conversation-based consultation but also provides the company with a group of fully pre-qualified leads and email marketing follow-up data that they can act upon.

Autonomous content management systems (CMS)

Using an automated CMS can significantly improve your website in more ways than one.

For example, HubSpot’s CMS can not only help to automatically increase conversions based on visitor data but also reduce longer-term front-end development costs in the process too.

Hubspot’s CMS uses collected-data in order to personalise the experience for the user accordingly, helping them find the right content in the most convenient place, which ultimately leads them to convert more effectively online.Automated email marketingFrom a simple online enquiry to an abandoned e-commerce shopping cart; automated email marketing allows businesses follow-up on these styles of leads with minimum effort.

By using this method of automation, it allows businesses to email leads with specific details, in order to add an element of personalisation; which can help to better appeal to specific audiences.

Not only is this a cost-effective method of increasing conversions but also is an ideal method of using an automated system without having to completely remove all personalisation whatsoever.

Automatic feed integrations

Websites which rely on large amounts of another website’s data often use this method of integration, in order to automatically populate their website’s content through the use of data-feeds (for example, RSS, XML or CSV feeds).

These style of websites are usually affiliate sites, drop-shipping sites, other resellers and more.

A lot of these often rely on up-to-date data on an almost daily basis, meaning having to manually populate new data each day may not be feasible for some businesses manually.

Automated feed integration, paired with a cronjob, allows automatic feed importation to be scheduled from every second (not recommended), minute (also not recommended), hour, day, month or year.

Decide on web processes to automate

The best tip to help decide on which web automation a business needs is to determine which tasks take the longest time to complete.

After having this list, it’s then over to deciding on the feasibility of automation for each of the tasks.

If a task requires too much personalisation or flexibility, then it’s unlikely something that could be fully automated. However, automations could still be applied, for example, to at least half the task — which could still save a lot of time.